WSFA 12 Weather Blog

* Alabama Weather… What’s left of Gustav continues to spin northwest of here.  The majority of the really heavy rain with Gustav is up across Missouri and Arkansas, but there is a narrow band of showers and storms that extends to the south - through MS and LA.

That narrow ribbon of rain will slice through MS today and perhaps affect west Alabama later this afternoon or evening.  Then tomorrow, we’ll deal with it.  It’s not much to write home about - just a broken line of showers with a few embedded storms.  However, if it pushes through during daylight hours, the increase in energy could be enoughThe band will push slowly east, and should be into Georgia by Saturday morning.

* Let’s Talk Tropics… The big story out in the Atlantic is what happened with IKE last night.  It was a tropical storm yesterday afternoon, and by 10pm, was a Category Four storm.  Here’s a satellite image of IKE:

This is a very compact hurricane, with a well-defined eye.  It will fight some shear in the days ahead, but as a well-structured, small storm, the shear will likely not weaken it tremendously.

By early next week, it appears likely that we will have a major hurricane moving in the general direction of south Florida.  From there, it could either get pushed back west towards the Gulf or curve north towards the East Coast.  If I HAD to try to guess right now, I’d say it’s likely to be a East coast issue.

Hanna is trying to get better organized - it’s sort of running out of time. It will be over very warm water, however, it’s just not organized enough to really tap into that as a source of intensification.  So, we’ll stick with the idea of a Cat 1 hurricane making landfall close to or just east of Wilmington.

Josephine has issues - right now, I’m not sure it will attain hurricane status.

Another update later this afternoon….